It was during the artistic fervour of 1920’s Paris that Miró first experimented with printmaking, developing close working relationships with masters of printing ateliers. His continuous experimentation with printmaking techniques throughout his career such as drypoint, etching and aquatint can be traced alongside his development of imagery from the delicate wiry lines in his more figurative earlier works to the much more abstracted simplified and stylised forms of his later works.

“A form gives me an idea, this idea evokes another form, and everything culminates in figures, animals, and things I had no way of foreseeing in advance”.

– Joan Miró

Miró was a key practitioner of the Surrealist idea of ‘automatism’- inspiration directly from the unconscious, which the artist would be impelled to transfer to paper. Miró would often replicate forms, making extensive use of found images, fragments of words or earlier sketches as the starting point for a work, carrying a small notebook in which he would fix any form that came to mind.

These sketches, cut-out images and bits of text would be used to establish the composition, which he would keep beside him whilst making a print, in order not to lose contact with the original inspiration. This allowed the marks he made to dictate both the formation of an image and the direction for the next work. This process was effectively his own kind of automatism, feeding off everything and anything in his surrounding environment.

“The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I am overwhelmed when I see a crescent moon or the sun in an immense sky. In my works there are often tiny forms in vast empty spaces. Empty spaces, empty horizons, empty plains – everything that has been stripped bare has always made a strong impression on me”.

– Joan Miró